We workers know what the word productivity means: that the boss squeezes the
juice out of us to the last drop. If one were to think about it in the abstract,productivity should be the fairy godmother of workers, because it allows them toobtain the same benefit with less effort. But when the rules are set by theowners of capital, things don't work that way. ---- The memory of our class,encrypted in the history of the labor movement and in the experience passed fromgeneration to generation, understands this issue since the beginning of time. Infact, the working class was born with the transformation of the productive systemthat resulted from the phenomenal increase in productivity at the beginning ofthe 19th century, as a consequence of the incorporation of automatic orsemi-automatic mechanisms in the workshops that soon became factories. In thosetimes, the compañerxs immediately understood that the machinery, the technology,would bring more benefits than problems, but that the bosses would keep thebenefits and the workers the problems.Today the situation is surprisingly similar. The productivity of the digitizedindustry, with the incorporation of the technical advances of the last 100 years,brings new transformations of unsuspected magnitude. And now: who will get thebenefit of this productivity and who will get the problems?The struggle of the workers in defense of their own living conditions, during thelast two hundred years, made the working class obtain certain conquests thatattenuated the structural injustices of the capitalist system. We have notmanaged to transform society, but at least we were able to get certain demandsrecognized in the form of labor law and the legitimacy of the organization. Butthese obtained claims, these circumstantial and partial conquests, are now in theprocess of going backwards in the name of productivity.Lurking among folders stacked in government offices and announced in thepermanent murmur of technocrats and leaders, a labor reform appears that has asingle function: to make employment relations more flexible. To that end, itseeks to facilitate hiring and, above all, dismissal, break the contention oflabor agreements, relocate tasks, transfer the capital contribution andderegulate the hourly load in a 4.0 version of piecework. Nothing new. What weare experiencing is one more turn in the wheel of dispossession, before which weare perhaps weaker than ever. The largest workers' organizations with thegreatest capacity for action are completely disconnected from the class, and areled in a medieval manner by business politicians dressed in overalls.The price of the legitimacy of the workers' organizations was paid with thelegislation of union activity, and that made what was at the time a prohibitionbecome a normative regulation of union activity, which imposes a bourgeoisbureaucratism on the organizations. at the service of the capitalists.In this context, we face a process of precariousness that seems essential for thehealth of a plundering system focused on productivity. Contemporary capitalismimposes a social renewal that it needs like water. This renewal does not bring usgood news: it is a radical setback of the workers' gains in exchange for statefinancing of poverty in the form of a universal basic income.At the same time, the daily tasks, fragmented in the general context of a serviceeconomy, are increasingly useless from the point of view of the real product. Wededicate a large part of our productive life to tasks that only serve to keep themachinery running without there being a material correlate that has any use.Delivered to the alienation of salary, the days go by without what we do makingmore sense to us.If we draw a line that projects us into the future, what we see coming is moreand more precariousness. Looking at the horizon, we look at a devastated land,symbolically and materially, by the infinite ambition of the concentrators ofwealth, of the hoarders, of the exploiters, of the plunderers. We see a setbackcoming, in the name of productivity, of the achievements obtained by dint of atireless economic and social struggle of the working class. Stable employment,linked to conditions established in the agreement, minimally contained by thebenefits of blank work, will be increasingly an exception in the context of an"independent" activity, made up of day laborers, changarines or "freelancers", byworkers who They will sell their time on a piece-rate basis as they can in a freemarket that has only the illusion of a singular autonomy. Or of the customarypoor of the "popular economy", subsistence consumers financed by the State sothat things do not explode and so that things are sold.But history does not follow a straight line because it is not the pureconsequence of physical events. History is the result of collective actions inwhich the will, decision and action of peoples make a difference.That is why the organization of workers now, at the dawn of the 21st century, ismore urgent than ever. We have the strength of the initiative and the historicalexperience, we have the ideas and the arms that can impose another destiny. Ifcapitalism cannot be sustained without ruining the fate of the workers, then itwill have to die at last, and the way to an increasingly equal society will beopened. If the present does not change, the future is precarious. The answer, asalways, is in our hands.https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2022/09/05/presente-dormido-futuro-precario/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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