Social Division of Labour
Mode: Production
When we are making something together, we often want to create roles for different people. This is standard practice in any form of industrialisation and the development of the factory system. When used within our practical work as communists, roles allow people to work more efficiently and hone a particular skill that will help them contribute to the struggle. We find that many leftists try to avoid the division of labour altogether, assuming that it will create problematic hierarchies and set certain individuals above others. When we practice the division of labour, we have to be mindful that it can result in what Marx calls ‘one-sided development’ and can therefore be a poor way to organise work when taken to the extreme. We have another technique for this problem where roles are rotated, which is explained below in the appendix.
When we make things in our ‘free time’ we often resort to doing so in an individualistic way. We can see here a distinction between the most collective form of life (in capitalist production) and the least collective form of life (in social reproduction, leisure, and the living of life outside work). Marx believed that the form of collective life prefigured in capitalist production would be transformed into the collectivisation of society as a whole under communism.
We often need to make things together in the movement, whether these things are meetings, food, propaganda and so on. In the realm of production that we might call ‘artistic’ we find that people are very likely to become stressed and concerned with the individual piece of ‘artwork’. This is a value taught in schools in bourgeoise societies. It has two complementary effects. One is that people ‘close down’; they become stressed out by the pressure of producing a statement of their individuality. The other is that people become very precious and obsessive about their own individual production, and cannot cope with their vision being obstructed in any way. When you think about school work it is obvious why this happens. 30 children are asked to complete a task, and each child has their name written at the top of the piece of paper. At the end, their task-completion is marked.
As difficult as it is while faced with the same material conditions that create individualism, it is necessary for communists to tackle individualism by learning how to self-consciously create things as a collective. The social division of labour is one way to do this. It says that everyone collectively is responsible for producing [the poster, the banner, the piece of theory] and that people are given particular roles. Of course, at the end of the process, people might do some work to ‘weld’ together the different elements, or to offer critique. But for the process of production, different people or groups have their own domain.
One question is how necessary it is to have a centralised vision when this is taking place. It depends a lot on what is being made. But in general, we find that either it is useful if the prompt has quite a strong tendency (for example, in Defend the Flag and the Mary Barnes exercise people are literally copying a drawing) or if everyone is responding to the same thing and it doesn't matter that much whether or not there is cohesion.
How might the social division of labour work?
Examples are the easiest way to describe this.
| 🔹When making a border, we often print ‘role-cards’ which assign different parts of the border (the corners, the words, the colours) to different people. 🔹When making something which requires different tools, you can assign the use of a particular tool to a different person each 🔹When there is a strong centralised idea of what is to be produced, you can assign the different elements of the production to different people. For example, in a newspaper you can assign to one person the production of a crossword, to another a cartoon, to a third an article about a particular person. Or, when copying a drawing, you can assign to one person the background, to another person one object, to another person a different object and so on. |
Appendix
Rotational Division
of Labour
In any division of labour, there is a risk that one person gets stuck doing one thing all the time. This can lead to specialisation in one skill, and a deficiency in every other skill. Like we mentioned above, this is what our friend Marx calls “one-sided development.” So there is a way to augment the division of labour by making it rotational. This way, everyone moves through the different stations of work and develops in a more well-rounded way through exposure to the different processes necessary to produce things. No one gets stuck doing the hardest part for too long without enjoying the easy parts, too, and vice versa. This helps to promote an understanding of the collective character of production, it promotes emulation and solidarity.
When operating according to a rota, there need to be systems for ensuring that things learned by one person doing a task can be passed on to the next person to do that task. Some of the classic roles that we rotate include:
In meetings:
Facilitator
Minute-Taker
Criticism Facilitator
In running sessions:
The timekeeper
The archivist (responsible for photographs and looking after things that are made)
The DJ (responsible for playing music appropriately)
The facilitator(s)
In paying attention to different elements of the organisation, we assign different people to consider each of these questions over the course of a month:
Are we cataloguing developing our work through problems that arise?
Are we devising education appropriate for the people as a whole?
Are we continuing to develop new exercises?
Are we developing education suitable for ‘activists’?
Are we developing education suitable for advanced communists?
Are we maintaining and making new links with comrades in other parts of the world, and are we materially helping them?
Are we developing our understanding of our own method, and out ability to describe it to others?
Are we continuing to develop our own organisational practices?
Your own work and organisation will have different roles that should be rotated. It should be noted that rotating roles require a lot of patience, and willingness to teach each other and admit what we don’t know or understand. It also requires people to work through things they find difficult and would rather not be doing.
It’s important to pay attention to the time scales of rotations. For example, in a union of some kind, it’s appropriate for weekly meeting facilitators to rotate each week. But it might be inappropriate to rotate the responsibility for managing outreach weekly because a week might not be enough time for the person in that role to learn the details or it might be impractical to switch at that rate. The point is that each role is concrete, and has specific elements that have to be considered in relation to time.
What’s the time?
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -