textfiles/reports/ACE/coal.txt

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Grade Level:       Type of Work           Subject/Topic is on:
 [ ]6-8                 [ ]Class Notes    [The coal miners in      ]
 [ ]9-10                [ ]Cliff Notes    [France and why they     ]
 [x]11-12               [x]Essay/Report   [revolted.               ]
 [ ]College             [ ]Misc           [                        ]

 Dizzed:7/94    # of Words:2017  School: ?              State: ?
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    The Coal Miners in France During the Second Empire:
    {Continued Subservience to the Capitalist Hierarchy}
     
     In this paper I will explain why revolt by the labor against capital
in Second Empire France failed.  To explain the situation, I will use
Marx's theory of capital accumulation as he presents it in {Capital}. Also
import- ant in the theoretical description of this phenomena is the role of
tradition and the way its restraints deviate from those of the economy in
this French society. Based on this description I will discuss how the
function of manage- ment is enforced by the economy and traditions inherent
in a society.  From these considerations I will suggest additional elements
and relationships necessary for social relations change to transcend the
institutional conditions in which they exist.

     Terminology relevent to a theoretical account of an event is given by
Talcott Parsons in {The Structure of Social Action}.  Here, action is
described as a system that may be divided into unit acts.  The unit act
consists of four elements. First there is an agent, or actor. Second, the
act has an end which is a future state of affairs or goal towards which the
action is oriented. Third, there is a situation where the trends of
develop- ment differ from the end towards which the action is oriented.
The situation is composed of two elements; the conditions are that which
the actor cannot manipulate in accordance with his end, and the means are
that over which he does not have control.  Finally there is a relation
between these elements; where a situation allows alterna- tive means to the
end, the course is selected from the normative orientation of the actor.
(Parsons, 1968: 44)

     In order to account for the interrelationships in the historical event
and to anticipate a successful change of the capitalist structure, I will
use the voluntarist theory of action as presented by Talcott Parsons.  This
theoretical approach, besides accounting for the unit act, describes the
process of interaction between norma- tive and conditional elements.  The
normative elements are positively inter-dependant with the conditional and
non- normative elements in a specifically determined way.  This is more
specifically ennunciated by the cybernetic model where there are at least
two parts; energy and informa- tion.  The first controls or regulates the
second while the second conditions, or limits, the first.  This model may
be used to find tendencial chang by showing the limits and range where the
variables of the economy, polity and ideology interact. (Gould,
"Marx=Weber":1-5) Analysis of the elements and the tendencial
interrelatedness should present an accurate theory of social change.

     The set of social relationships, patterns and subsequent restraints
between capital and labor as described by Marx's rendition of the
capitalist logic of production are clearly manifest in late nineteenth
century France.  Marx maintains that the capitalist is forced by
competitive pressure to maximize the surplus value present in the labor
power.  This surplus value is the amount over and above the cost to
reproduce labor which is extracted in the process of a working day.  In
order to achieve this end, the capitalist increases production by either
adding new machinery or devaluing labor power.

     Among the coal fields labor power is approaching an extreme low in the
pit of devaluation.  The Company, as generalized in Zola's {Germinal}, has
isssued a change in the method of payment for extracting coal from the
mines.  Instead of paying the teams of workers for the total bulk mined
they propose to cut the payment for coal and increase the payment of
building the shafts. Because of the greater time element involved in
"timbering" the shafts, the workers take an overall cut in wages.  This
surplus is re-invested into the production process so the firm may retain a
competitive status in the industry. The living standards are very low for
the worker both relative to the captialist as well as in an absolute sense.
There is a minimal of food which is provided by the company store.  Since
the families are in debt to the store even if there are other jobs
available, they cannot leave the firm. Marx writes that in order for the
capitalist logic to work, the labor will be paid enough to survive and
reproduce.  The conditions of the workers are below this level for several
months. Prior to the Company's payment alteration, the women had become
sterile from the malnutrition.  There was no water supply, sewer systems or
heating in the overcrowded homes. (Zola, 1873) In the mines, there were
frequent fires from improperly ventilated chambers as well as cave-ins in
the shafts. Because of a round-the-clock shift that workers demanded to
maintain a constant salary, the only enforcement of safety was the sanction
of a fine legitimized by the system.  Because of the already minimal wage,
however, the workers could not afford to spend time rendering their
conditions safer.

     Within Marx's theory of the labor relations of production the material
conditions are such that the proletariat may strike out against the
capitalist.  The ideology is not, however, derived from these conditions.
The ideology is a latent element seperate from the economy which surfaces
because of the worsening condi- tions.  The from the ideology takes is a
spokesman. There has always, in the history of the coalminer-captialist
relation, been spokesmen who voice an ideology which suggests radical
change to be instigated by the captialist for his long term security.
These spokesmen had, until this point, been sanctioned publicly for
violating the traditional, legitimized norms and thus been forced to leave
because of the monopoly the captialist had on the power of employment.  As
the living conditions pass below sub-standard, the labor force becomes less
suseptable to the existing sanctions because they have nothing to lose.

     The workers have traditional needs and expectations. When the living
conditions become sub-standard due to the competitive captialist economy
the traditonal values may no longer be sacrificed by the system since the
system from where the values are derived cannot maintain and reproduce
itself.  Since the worker's traditional needs and expectations cannot be
met, the limiting structure of the economy forces the values beyond
material limits. These are the conditions for a structural genesis;
traditonal values, at least those required for the reproduction of labor,
demand rational action beyond the conditons of the economy.

     The economy and the ideology both as independant elements in society
and, as they interrelate, show an inevitable genesis of change within the
system.  If these were the only conditions necessary for change in the
relations of production and society then it would occur. There is, however,
a condition not yet accounted for, that of the polity, and its relation to
the economy and ideo- logy.

     The polity is essentially embodied by the capitalist hierarchy.  Here
at the top there is a president, the board of directors, and the
stockholders.  The admini- strators who actually enforce policy on the the
laborer are the district managers, the local managers and the shop
director.  The structure at the time of the coalminer strike was such that
the top enchillon, in fact even the district manager, was completely
removed from the practical activities of the industry.  They are depicted
as setting profit margins and quotas of output. It is the responsibility of
the local manager to meet these standards and the responsibility of he shop
director to motivate the actual production.

     As the strike of the miners endured, it was first the shop directors,
then the local and district directors that were immediately affected.  The
control of the corporate directors, however, was never in question. After
several months of violent revolt and destruction the corporate body, whose
legitimacy had not been questioned directly by the laborors, reinstitued
the pre- strike traditional norms with moderate concessions of minimal
safety standards.  The workers returned to the mines; the ideology receeded
to a latent state easily contained within the material limits of the
economy.

     What must the nature of the polity as independant variable as well as
an interrelated condition of the social system be in order for a revolution
that renders it capable of transformation? Stephen A. Marglin, in his essay
"What Do Bosses Do?," suggests that social and economic organization shape
technology and that the primary choices (by hierarchy within its means)
with respect to the organization of production has not been technology,
which is exogenous and inexorable, but the exercise of power, which is
endogenous and resistable. (Marglin; 1976:17) This implies, in keeping with
the results of the coalminer strike, that the capitalist has some control
over the work process.  This control is limited by the economy, therefore I
contend that a revolution transforming the class division in society is
possible when the polity is as closely related to the economy as the value
system was in France where the plity and value system are diametrically
opposed and neither is capable of maintaining its reproduction within the
economy.  I suggest this argument as the reverse process of what Braverman
writes in {Labor and Monopoly Capital}) of the growing independance of the
capitalist hierarchy, "law and custom reshaped to reflect the predominance
of the `free' contract between buyer and seller under which the captialist
gained the virtually unrestricted power to determine the technical modes of
labor." (Braverman;1974: 60) A narrowing process on captialist freedom will
subsequently limit power.  He goes on to suggest that this power is limited
by the inability to change the process of production and that the
captialist strives through management to control the production process and
laborer (Braverman, 1974: 66,68).

     Provided this insight is consistantly true, the antagonism between the
captialist and laborer should be accompanied by social relations the limits
tendentially narrow, at an increasing rate, the production process. Thus
the economy and polity need to be mutually restrictive and the ideology
must be latent and conductive to a structure beyond the limits of
capitalist economy. As the ideology is a genesis of the divergence of
traditonal and rational legal values imposed by the economy, the polity
must likewise blatantly induce the divergence of traditonal and rational-
legal values. The independant conditon of the polity must therefore be a
hierarchy similar to that of the capitalist production structure as well as
forced by the economy to derive power in order to reproduce itself.

     As machine capital slows its expansion rate, a change dictated by
scarcity of raw materials, the polity will also have a decreased
acceleration. As Parson writes on Weber, "With the use of a concept of
authority there is both (economy and polity) a clear recognition of the
importance of coercive power as exercised by a variety of means, and a
recognition that there is a definite limit to the extent to whcih these may
be made to fit into ordinary economic categories..." (Parsons 1968 p. 718)
Thus the polity is limited in range by the economy.

     A social change to maintained, the ideology of a new legitimate order
should be established either by routinization or objectification.  It must
be sanctified in the real order to be a "real" change.  The charismatic
element of ideology reinforces an initial structural change.  Events will
subsequently no longer happen but attain meaning in the light of the source
that the charismatic element advocates.  This change in normative
orientations relative to the change in other elements of the process must
be reflected in the ideology.  The ideology of social change may not simply
be a reiffication of the old in a reactionary form.  The substance of the
ideology, in being a response to the divergence caused by the economy and
polity, must be such as to transcend that which came before it.  This final
condition, specifying the relations between elements necessary for
revolutionary change, may only be derived in a society which is neither an
organic, composite whole nor one of random atomistic ends. Rather, the
society must be one where the normative orientation for mediating between
conditions and means is one of consensus.