Celebrating Labor Day in the U.S. A Brief Reverie

 

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The U.S. Department of Labor devotes a web page to the genesis of Labor Day in the United States:

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Observed the first Monday in September, Labor Day is an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers. The holiday is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity, and well-being. * * * The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883. By 1894, 23 more states had adopted the holiday, and on June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday.

 It is useful to celebrate the social and economic achievements of labor. It is equally useful to recall that all this celebration perhaps distract from an unchanging reality that marks labor across the spectrum of all political systems grounded in the primacy of capital as the pivotal force from and through which social collectives can realize their dreams. These include on one end private markets primacy liberal democratic systems and on the other centrally planned state economic-political systems.

The reality is quite simple to understand and much more difficult to overcome: Societies grounded in capital primacy are built on the fundamental premise that one sells labor which is then consumed and one invests capital that must be returned and which shares in the profits and losses of the economic enterprise for the operationalization of which it is used.  That difference makes all the difference in the world. And no amount of celebration can change that.  

Put differently, whether a person is part of the economic-political space of liberal democracy or of Marxist-Leninist realities, that person who has only their body and skill can barter that for a fixed amount of cash.  Labor may take that cash and invest it--their labor can produce capital. At the same time that labor is also necessary for meeting one's needs--food, shelter, transport, clothing, etc. The good news, of course, is that those who sell their labor do not share the risk of the business failing and the loss of their capital. On the other hand, they also have no share in the value added of their productivity--that is captured to capital and in good years made available for distribution to holders of capital investments or further invested in the enterprise (hopefully raising the aggregate value of the proportionate holding of the capital investors). Still, unlike capital that never disappears, labor is consumed--once it is expended it, like any other wasting asset, cannot be retrieved and used again.  It is gone, and with it whatever was necessary to produce that object (labor) of consumption. This relationship does not change whether capital investing is widely held or whether the State is the sole shareholder (or capital owner) of all capital invested in economic enterprises. 

What, then, does one celebrate on Labor Day? One celebrates a sort of structural inequality in the forms in which it is possible to invest in an economic enterprise.  One celebrates the fundamental division between capital that shares in the risks and rewards of the enterprise unconsumed except where the risk of failure is fully realized and labor that avoids risk entirely but is wholly consumed in the process.  One celebrates the strength of a premise--a core conceptual "truth" that runs across the entirety of the organization of economic activity--that labor is a cost of doing business, a component of production, and that capital is flow, the active element that grows as it is used and that is not consumed but instead provides the basis for transaction in the consumption of  other things. One celebrates the fundamental belief that though labor is consumed without regard to risk, that the object of consumption is expected to act as if it were capital--that is is meant to produce far more than the cost of its purchase--that it ought to act like capital but be rewarded in one off transactions (effort for pay). One celebrates the idea that capital can and must be aggregated to achieve most efficient use; and that labor cannot aggregate for precisely the same reason, such aggregation constrains the ability of capital to reproduce itself through the consumption of objects the synthesis of which produces something else that can itself be  sold for more than the sum of the costs of its making. And ultimately one celebrates dependency.  Capital is, in a sense freer than labor. One does not part with capital; one parts with labor expended. And that makes one more dependent on those who might seek to purchase and consume labor.  For labor, then, the spectrum runs from total dependence (it has a name) to an equivalence with capital in the sensibilities of its participation in the field of economic activity. 

For all of this one ought to be grateful. One ought to be grateful for the possibility of selling oneself for a fixed wage, to learn to appreciate the sublime sacrifice of delivering more than the value of the labor that is purchased, and to embrace the solidarity of the self in the face of large aggregations of capital that themselves acquire a legal personality distinct from those whose capital made that possible. Perhaps, at some point one might also be grateful for a rupture of the cognitive cage of this distinction and the eventual emergence of a world in which capital and labor are both objects of investment in the exercise of production.

For all of that those who sell their labor salute those whose capital make that possible.  And, indeed, the object is not to tear down capital--the utility of which is recognized from the great halls of private markets-based enterprises to the great state enterprises of Marxist Leninist lands. It is the opposite of anti-capital; it is instead pro-labor. One ought not to try to tear down capital so that is it no better than labor today; though for those who can protect their privileged position in the spheres of capital (intellectuals, political people and influencers making a lot of it) it is always fun to pretend to do so (while keeping one's capital well protected).  One might instead perhaps consider raising up the ordering premises of labor so that it functions like capital. Or put differently, it may be time to (re)consider that one might purchase capital and invest in labor.

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