File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 385


Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 15:54:33 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Kim Moody on the working-class


The Industrial Working Class Today: Why It Still Matters Or Does It?

by Kim Moody
(from Against the Current magazine, on Solidarity's Web Page)

DURING THE 1980s the theorists of post-industrialism, post-modernism and/or
flexible specialization dismissed the industrial working class from the
stage of history. No one was more dismissive than the dean of
post-industrialists, Peter Drucker, who wrote, "No class in history has
ever risen faster than the blue-collar worker. And no class in history has
ever fallen faster." (Drucker, 1994)

Whether or not they directly addressed Marxism, as Drucker did, these
theorists drew on the obvious fact that the traditional goods-producing
workforce was declining as a proportion of the total workforce and even in
absolute numbers in much of the developed industrial world. Furthermore, as
the flexible specialization theorists emphasized, the average manufacturing
workplace was getting smaller and centralized production complexes were
giving way to clusters or chains of smaller producers.

All of these trends seem to contradict the image conjured up by Marx's
famous statement in the "Communist Manifesto" that "with the development of
industry the proletariat not only increases its number; it becomes
concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that
strength more." (Feuer: 16)

Certainly in the United States, the last twenty years or more do not
resemble this picture of capitalist development. The changes in the
structure and organization of capitalism both in the developed industrial
nations and internationally have reshaped the working classes profoundly.
For revolutionary Marxists these changes pose the question of whether or
not the industrial working class remains central to revolutionary socialist
strategy Before discussing the relative weight of the industrial working
class, an historical note is in order. Drucker reminds us that during
Marx's life and even into the 20th century the two largest groups of
toilers were farmers and live-in servants. (Drucker, 1994) In other words,
the majority of working people were not engaged in wage-labor in the
Marxist sense.

It is evident today that the vast majority of the population (perhaps 80%
of the workforce) live and reproduce themselves only through wage-labor
that produces surplus value, regardless of the nature of the commodity
(good or service) they produce. Whatever the changing weight of the
industrial sector of this enormous, working majority, it is clear that the
working class as a whole is proportionately far larger today than at the
time of classical Marxist writers such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky,
Luxemburg, Gramsci and so on.

WHAT IS THE INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS?

Even so seemingly simple a question as what the industrial working class
is, isn't simple. Marxists have debated this for decades and continue to do
so. As Hal Draper points out in his Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, the
industrial working class is not limited to those "at the point of
production" or even those producing "goods.' As capitalism 'commodities"
more and more aspects of life, services too become commodities and some
increasingly important to accumulation. Strictly speaking, the industrial
'proletariat" is not even limited to manual workers. At the same time, it
does not include everyone who works for a wage or salary. (Draper:33-38)

Like the capital that gives birth to it, the working class continuously
changes. Radical changes in the global division of labor, for example,
bring with them enormous labor migrations, industrialization in one region
and deindustrialization in another, and deep changes in the social
composition of the class. Changes in technology and the general tendency of
production to become more 'round about" alter the weight and functional
composition of the industrial working class.

It is this latter transformation that this article will focus on. Although
the figures in the text and the Statistical Appendix are from the United
States, the trends described apply to many other industrial nations as well.

There are three major changes in contemporary capitalism that are altering
the structure and composition of the working class as a whole and of the
industrial working class in particular. The first has to do with the
general progress of technology in the course of capitalist accumulation and
development. Here I will look at what Marx had to say about this in his
more advanced theorization of capitalist development.

The second is the change in the national and international division of
labor associated with the reorganization of production along the lines of
internationalized "lean production" -- the real context of flexible
specialization. The third, which flows from the first two trends, is the
tendency of accumulation to absorb more and more of the formerly
independent 'infrastructure" into production itself. (Sassen: passim.) This
latter notion is associated with technological advances in transportation
and telecommunications and their increased incorporation into today's
production chains.

The conclusion I draw from these trends is that today's industrial working
class is composed of far more than workers in traditional blue-collar
factory jobs and their households. It necessarily includes many workers
often theorized as post- industrial, information age, or service economy
workers.

For the purposes of this analysis, I will define the industrial working
class as those private sector production or nonsupervisory workers (and
their households) in mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation,
communications and energy production, on the grounds that these are the
areas of the economy most central to the contemporary accumulation process.

Defined in this way, as the figures in the Appendix show, the U.S.
industrial Workforce, the employed sector of the industrial working class,
declined from about half the private sector, nonsupervisory workforce in
the 1960s to 29% in 1992. In absolute terms, the industrial workforce
peaked in the late 1970s at about 22 million and is now at the numerical
level of the 1960s of slightly more than 20 million production workers.

The "disappearance" of the industrial working class, so far, is largely a
decline in proportion due to the rise of service sector employment in
recent years. In actual fact, these figures understate both the absolute
and relative size of the industrial working class.

Government workers, of course, are also working class people, some of them
part of the industrial working class by virtue of their role in
transportation, communications, and energy production. As of 1992, there
were some 644,000 federal, state and local employees engaged in
manufacturing, ship building, transportation, communications and energy. An
additional 792,000 employees worked for the postal service. (Department of
Labor, 1994: 474478)

Much the same can be said of many workers in classifications like wholesale
trade, business services and other services that are really contracted
pieces of production. The problems of incorporating these workers that are
built into the government figures, however, lead me to exclude them in this
analysis, hence understating the size and weight of today's industrial
working class.

AN OPTICAL ILLUSION

It should also be borne in mind that the rapid expansion of the "service"
sector in relation to total employment rests in part on a kind of optical
illusion. For one thing, as Andrew Sayer and Richard Walker effectively
argue, many industries lumped into the service sector by conventional
government statistics produce measurable material commodities.

For example, coal and oil taken from the earth are "goods," but
manufactured electric power or gas are "services." Conversely, as Sayer and
Walker point out, the "Economist's" definition of "services" as "everything
you cannot drop on your foot" is much too broad. If the labor force
statistics were divided along Marxist lines between production and
circulation, the result would be very different from the current picture of
the "service economy." (Sayer and Walker:56-69)

For another, much of the numerical growth of employment in services is the
result of the disproportionate number of part- time jobs in that sector,
particularly in the wholesale and retail trade (30%) and catch-all services
(24%) categories, compared to the industrial sector (7%). (Department of
Labor, 1995: 221)

Thus, while average weekly hours in manufacturing were 41.4 in 1993, in
retail they were 28.8 and in "services" they were 32.5. In other words, the
proportion of society's total labor hours performed by the industrial
working class is significantly higher than the mere numbers of its workers.
Also, 73% of multiple-job holders work in the service sector, which
exaggerates the number of actual workers, as opposed to jobs (many
part-time) in that sector (Department of Commerce: 405,420)

The final deflector in this optical illusion is that the massive growth of
retail and service employment is also in large part a function of the
technological backwardness of these sectors. The application of "lean
production" methods and process technology to these labor-intensive sectors
is only now beginning, in part because of the abundance of cheap labor, and
productivity growth in these areas remains low.

In fact, it is these sectors that are a drag on the frequently cited low
productivity figures for the U.S. economy-productivity gains in the
industrial sectors have been at or above historic levels for some time. But
insofar as "reengineering" and process technology take hold in retail and
services, as they already have in finances, job growth will slow and in
some areas give way to declining employment levels.

WHAT DOES MARXISM REALLY SAY?

One interpretation of Marx's statement that "with the development of
industry the proletariat not only increases its number, it becomes
concentrated in greater masses..." has been that production complexes would
become larger and draw in more workers. Though this has been the 'story" at
the heart of much revolutionary strategy and thought for decades, it hasn't
been true for half a century.

While in the United States and many other fully developed capitalist
nations the industrial working class has in fact continued to grow
numerically until very recently, peaking in the United States in the late
1970s, it has obviously shrunk as a proportion of the total employed
working class. Similarly, the number of manufacturing plants employing
1,000 or more workers has actually declined from 3,000 in 1963 to 2,000 in
1987 (the most recent figure). The number of small and medium sized plants,
on the other hand, has grown. (Department of Commerce: 752)

Like most aspects of Marxist analysis, the development of the proletariat
has more than one side. Marx, for example, simultaneously saw the working
class as the "universal" collectivist class and as a class ripped apart by
internal competition and contradictions.

Thus, he saw a previously dispersed agrarian mass herded into cities and
factories as they never had been before and transformed, over time, into a
far more concentrated social class. He chronicled the transformation of
"the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great industrial
factory of the industrial capitalist." Bear in mind, however, that an
average "great industrial factory" when Marx penned those words (1848)
probably employed fewer than 100 workers.

When, in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, Trotsky examined Germany and
Russia, he discovered that in "advanced" Germany most plants employed less
than 50 workers (accounting for 44% of the workforce), while only 10% of
the manufacturing workforce worked in the 563 factories employing over
1,000 workers. And this was a half-century after Marx had made his initial
projections about "great industrial factories." (Trotsky: 38-39)

Despite the persistence of not-so-large plants, the trend toward larger
factories would, of course, continue with the emergence of mass production
after the turn of the century. There is, however, another side of Marx's
analysis of the development of the working class in the advancing process
of accumulation. As Marx expressed it in "Capital", "Once given the general
basis of the capitalistic system, then, in the course of accumulation, a
point is reached at which the development of the productivity of social
labor becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation." (Marx, 1967:621)

The title of the section in which he develops this idea is titled "Relative
Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously With The Progress
of Accumulation and of the Concentration That Accompanies It." The variable
part of capital is, of course, labor-power. The point is clear: As the
productivity of labor increases due to the constant and growing application
of fixed capital (concentration), the actual need for workers diminishes in
relation to output.

Thus, far from producing ever greater concentrations of workers, the
concentration of capital actually begins to reduce them at some point. This
aspect of Marx's analysis of the development of capital and the class it
employs is linked to the concept of relative surplus value, where the time
required to reproduce the laborer is reduced by labor's growing productivity.

The concept of relative surplus value makes it clear that in the course of
capitalist development, the amount of labor-power required by capital must
decline. Marx was explicit on this point, writing in the "Grundrisse":

In the second form of surplus value, however, as relative surplus value,
which appears as the development of the workers' productive power, as the
reduction of necessary labor time relative to the working day, and as the
reduction of the necessary laboring population relative to the population,
in this form there directly appears the industrial and the distinguishing
historical character of the mode of production founded on capital. (Marx,
1973: 769) This "distinguishing" characteristic of capitalism is what
creates the reserve army of labor so essential to Marx's view of wage
determination and capitalist development. The reserve army is not primarily
the result of the business cycle or of changes in the international
division of labor, though it may be affected by both. It is an essential
feature of developed capitalism.

The reserve army of labor is not only the unemployed, but the
underemployed, casualized labor, and the latent workforce found among labor
force drop-outs and groups not yet in the labor force- in other words, many
of those often described today as "contingent" workers or as working in the
"underground economy."

Capitalism thus both creates full-time industrial work and shatters it over
the course of its development. In addition, as "the productivity of social
labor becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation," each new generation
of plants will employ still fewer workers per unit of capital. These new
plants are not necessarily smaller in terms of physical size, capital
invested or output; but they will employ fewer workers in proportion to all
three.

Marxism thus tells us that the fifty-year old trend toward plants with
decreasing concentrations of workers is inherent in capitalism itself,
quite aside from the acceleration of the process brought on by
decentralized and internationalized production techniques.

Concentration and Centralization of Capital Plant size is only one aspect
of the concentration of capital. The concentration of capital proceeds from
accumulation itself. As capital (organized as a company or corporation)
accumulates, it does not simply add to the same old plant. It also builds
new plants, some spatially removed from the older ones.

Indeed, given the historic rise of urban and then suburban land rents,
geographic dispersion is also a virtually inevitable outcome of
accumulation and concentration in the long run. The post-WWII period of
growth in the United States saw the industrial giants like GM or GE grow in
this manner, almost entirely through reinvesting profits in new
plants-removed from old urban centers of working class organization. Though
their plants were strung across the country, they were still concentrations
of capital in precisely the sense that Marx meant.

In recent years this type of concentration has decelerated as capital put a
growing proportion of productive investment into labor-saving technology to
cope with the intensified competition that is also built into the
accumulation process. Instead, capitals have expanded their operations more
through mergers, buyouts, and takeovers-in amounts that exceeded
expenditures on plant and equipment in manufacturing by the late 1980s.

This Marx called the centralization of capital, which he saw as simply
another way to "extend the scale of their operations," one that
'intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation." Overall the
process creates larger and larger capitals or firms. For the winners, this
process too "raises its constant portion at the expense of its variable
portion." (Marx, 1967:625-628)

The expansion through combined concentration and centralization of capital
leads toward the development of larger capitals with increasing
concentrations of workers-not in individual plants, but under the same
capital or employer. This is reflected in the fact that, as you can see in
the Statistical Appendix, up to the late 1970s multi-plant companies grew
faster than single-plant companies, employed a growing proportion of
workers, and created an increasing percentage of the value-added in
manufacturing.

While the 1980s saw a small reversal in this direction (for reasons
discussed below), it is clear that the tendency is for small
(entrepreneurial or sub-contracting) outfits to grow or be gobbled up, as
has happened in electronics.

Employment levels in multi-plant firms saw a similar pattern, but 72% of
manufacturing workers worked in multi-plant firms in 1987 compared to 68%
in 1963. These multi-plant firms produced 82% of all manufacturing value
added by 1987.

Figures on the concentration of assets illustrate the trend even more
graphically. Over the twenty years following 1970, the corporations worth
over $1 billion increased their share of corporate assets from 49% to 72%
of the total, at the expense of both small and middle-sized corporations.
(Department of Commerce: 558)

So it is that the gathering of larger groups of workers under the same
capital does increase through the combination of concentration and
centralization of capital. In fact, in relation to the rest of the economy,
even the concentrations of industrial workers in their individual
workplaces remains greater than those of other workers.

Despite the declining average employment in manufacturing plants, the
concentration of workers in manufacturing plants remains higher than in any
other sector, with 23.4% of employees working in plants of 1,000 or more
workers. Transportation, communications and energy are next at 18%. The
average for the private economy as a whole is 13%.

The number of employees in plants or work locations employing over 1,000
people was 5.9 million in 1990 (compared, for example, to the 562,600 in
Germany or the 710,000 in Russia just prior to the two biggest
revolutionary upheavals ever experienced in Europe). Industrial workers in
the United States in 1990 accounted for almost half of those in single work
locations of 1,000 or more employees, even though they are only 29% of
total production worker employment. (Department of Commerce: 572)

Incorporation of "Infrastructure" The rise of smaller, single plant firms
since the 1970s was one piece of the evidence that flexible specialization
was the wave of the future. As it turns out, however, the phenomenon of the
small, flexible firm is only a piece of the larger picture of lean production.

A central feature of this now-universalizing production strategy is a high
level of out-sourcing and subcontracting. What has become clear, however,
is that this is not some new era of small- scale, innovative
entrepreneurialism. As Bennett Harrison has shown in "Lean and Mean," the
disaggregation of production through out-sourcing is not about the rise of
small business.

Harrison sees the growth of "decentralized activity with concentrated
control over resources." He argues that the proliferation of small firms is
the creation of the same giant multinational corporations that dominate
world production:

Rather than dwindling away, concentrated economic power is changing its
shape, as the big firms create all manner of networks, alliances, short-
and long-term financial and technology deals-with one another, with
governments at all levels, and with legions of generally (although not
invariably) smaller firms who act as their suppliers and subcontractors.
(Harrison: 8-12)

In other words, even where the workers in these supplier and contractor
firms fall outside the technical limits of concentration and
centralization, they are brought into the same lean production system as
the employees of the corporate giants who dominate it.

Internationalized lean production with its modified just-in-time links in
the production chain are heavily dependent on the means of transportation
and telecommunications, as well as on the infrastructure that supports
them. This is one reason why telecommunications operations, port
authorities, airports, railroads and even highways have increasingly become
the object of privatization where they are state-owned.

These traditionally independent "services" have become as much a part of
competing systems of lean production as the assembly lines they terminate
in. They are both costs and capital inputs in the production process
itself, to a far greater degree than in either the vertically integrated
mass production or market-based "commodity-chain" systems of the past.
Hence, even though still largely employed by independent capitals or even
by the state, workers in such industries must be regarded as part of
today's contemporary industrial working class.

To summarize, the industrial working class is numerically and
proportionately larger than is generally assumed. At the same time, it
remains more concentrated than any other sector of the class, with
manufacturing workers still being the most concentrated. For example, 70%
of the manufacturing workforce is employed by the 1% of firms that employ
500 or more workers. In the private sector as a whole only 41 % work for
companies of this size. (Harrison: 47)

Furthermore, compared to thirty or forty years ago (the hey-days of U.S.
unionism), more of the companies for which they work own more assets and
employ more workers. In this respect, the concentration of workers in
Marx's sense remains a central feature of industrial working class life.

The Basis of Industrial Workers' Power As important as the relative
concentration of industrial workers is to trade union organization, their
long-term strategic position in the accumulation process is even more so
for the purposes of revolutionary theory and practice.

Viewed in terms of the economy as a whole, the proportion of real Gross
Domestic Product produced by this declining number of industrial workers
actually grew from 42.61/o in 1960 to 44% in 1989. (Council of Economic
Advisors: 274-289) This is due largely to the higher productivity rates of
the industrial workforce. This, in turn, reflects the increased
concentrations of capital that these industrial workers put into motion.
Thus, real assets per manufacturing worker grew from $9,300 in 1963 to
$26,040 in 1987.

Perhaps even more important is that this portion of national output is,
quite literally, the "foundation" of almost all other economic activity-in
the sense that it is the industrial working class that produces (and often
runs) the entire infrastructure and "built environment" on which both
accumulation and daily life rest: roads, ports, airports, railroads,
factories, office buildings, streets, public transit, housing, etc.

It is also the sector that produces capital in all its physical forms.
Wholesale and retail trade, finances, overseas trade and many services in
the sphere of circulation grow on this productive foundation, providing
what employment growth the system still maintains.

Actual services such as education and health care also rest on the
foundation of production as part of the general process of class
reproduction. In the latter case, the trend is to commodity these services
and emulate industrial methods of organization and delivery.

In other words, the industrial working class has a potential power no other
social grouping, within or outside the working class, has. It is only a
potential power, waiting to be organized and exercised. But it is this
fundamental relationship to all economic activity that gives the industrial
working class its central role as "gravedigger" of the old society and
organizer of the new.

FROM POTENTIAL TO ORGANIZATION

As Marx noted in the "Manifesto", "This organization of the proletarians
into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being
upset again by the competition between the workers themselves." (Feuer: 16)
This has a contemporary enough ring, but Marx went even more into "modern
labor relations" a decade later when he wrote, 'the competition among the
workers is only another form of the competition among capitals.' (Marx,
1973: 651)

Modern labor reformism, business unionism and labor-management cooperation
are some of the major "official" ideological expressions of this
competition and fragmentation within the workers' movement. Racism and
sexism, of course, have their unofficial place in this rogues gallery of
divisive ideologies that infect the working class. Whatever their separate
origins, these ideologies are persistent because they are materially
rooted, among other places, in this "competition among capitals." Current
labor-management cooperation ideologies, of course, attempt to incorporate
this "competition among capitals" into the official union program.

Today, the "competition between the workers themselves" is driven by the
threat or reality of plant closings, downsizing, declining job
opportunities, whipsawing, and the growing reign of "cooperation" that pits
workers against one another. It is augmented by the large size of the
reserve army of labor, where it takes on an even greater racial and gender
dimension. It has a paralyzing and demoralizing effect further compounded
by the collaboration of most of the union bureaucracy in the process itself.

I would argue that this competition is the major reason for trade union
retreat and paralysis-far more important than the relative decline in
workplace employment size or even geographic dispersion, neither of which
have precluded unionization, militancy or political radicalization in the
past.

The only solution Marx, or anyone else I'm aware of, proposed for the
competition among workers was/is organization. Only organization can "take
labor out of competition" -- not Marx's phrase, but essentially that he
argues. Whether this is accomplished through "collective bargaining,"
political action, or the revolutionary conquest of power, organization is
essential.

Only organization represents a step toward the formation of a class "for
itself." Concentration was never in itself a solution since the
concentrated capitals also competed and shed workers- more ruthlessly as
their size grew. It only provided a setting that the countryside and
isolated small-scale production had not provided for creating organization.

Trade unions, educational societies, political associations (e.g.
Chartism), mutual aid societies and political parties were among the web of
organizations that moved the 19th century proletariat in the regions of
advanced capitalism toward becoming a class-an organized, conscious social
formation. The process, however, was again and again thwarted by the
paralyzing affects of competition, crisis and restructuring.

The ability to turn potential power into real power is largely a question
of organization and consciousness. Over and over, older forms of both
workplace (i.e. craft control) and industrial organization were destroyed
and new forms of organization, usually broader or deeper in reach (like
shop stewards councils), were needed to overcome persistent competition.

Although the decline of unionism has reached crisis proportions in the
private sector, the industrial working class remains better organized than
any other group of workers in the private sector, where the brunt of
competition is sharpest. The unionization rate for manufacturing workers
was 20% in 1992, for transportation 31 %, communications and energy workers
33%; not all that far behind public sector workers in their level of
unionization, and way ahead of workers in trade (6.6%) or services (5%). If
we consider only production and nonsupervisory workers, then the industrial
working class as a whole is almost one-third organized.

Contrary to what is often written on the left about industrial workers, the
level of representation of workers of color among them is slightly higher
than in the workforce as a whole: Blacks are 11% in the industrial
workforce vs. 10% overall, and Latinos are 8% vs. 7.6%. Although unions are
as riddled with racism as any American institution, they are also among the
most multi-cultural organizations in the United States. Indeed workers of
color tend to be more favorable toward unions, a fact that will be
extremely important as new organization begins to emerge.

While women have been underrepresented in the industrial workforce (27%
compared to 45.7% in the total private workforce), they have grown somewhat
as a proportion: from 26% in manufacturing in 1960 to 33% in 1992 and from
23% of the entire industrial workforce to 27% in the same period.

The low overall rate of representation is largely a function of the
consistently low numbers of women in construction, transportation (except
airlines) and energy production. In some sectors, however, women compose a
key element of the workforce, with the proportion near the overall average:
40% in airlines; 41% in non-durable manufacturing; and 45% in communications.

Overall, by 1992, white males composed only a slight majority (51%) of the
industrial workforce compared to two-thirds thirty years earlier.
(Department of Labor, 1979,1994) The demographics of the industrial working
class have become more like those of the rest of the class.

Today, in much of the industrialized and semi-industrialized world, many
active workers are groping for new kinds of organizations or trying to
change old ones to meet the present challenges posed by capital in its most
international transformation to date. Not only is the U.S. model of
business unionism-plus-pressure politics inadequate to the period, so is
the trade unions plus-party (good or bad) formula of European social
democracy. The search for organization appropriate to this phase of
capitalism is a global conversation.

The importance of union reform activity in the major unions of industrial
workers flows from the continued centrality of these workers to the system.
If they remain disorganized and unorganized, radicalization will remain a
distant hope. But we not only need democratic unionism and a new working
class party backed by the industrial working class-we need an overall
strategy for the class as a whole, a proliferation of mass organizations of
various kinds.

The workers' centers are a hopeful sign of stirring in the newer and more
fragmented sections of the class. Cross-union formations like jobs with
Justice represent another dimension, as do the new efforts at cross-border
organizing and international solidarity.

For more inspiration in this global conversation we can look to Latin
America (above all Brazil) and South Africa. It is not only their militant
industrial unions that are important, or even the Workers' Party, but the
unions of dispersed/casualized workers (e.g. Amazon rubber tappers), the
many community-based mass organizations, the 'civics' in South Africa, the
mass women's organizations-all of which see themselves as a piece of the
puzzle of working class power.

It should be obvious that these kinds of working class- organizations-and
that is just what they are-are relevant to our own increasingly fragmented,
casualized workforce. Together with the unions of private and public sector
workers, and political parties all workers can, share, these organizations
can compose a new workers movement to resist a new capitalist order and
bring about its eventual abolition.

STATISTICAL NOTES

NOTE 1: Industrial Workers as % of Private Production Workers

(in thousands)                 1965   1978   1992
Total Private Production     42,278 57,543 72,866
Industrial Workforce(1)      20,238 22,661 20,872
Industrial as % of Total        49%    39%    29%


(1) Industrial = Mining + Construction + Manufacturing + Transport +
Utilities + Communications.

Source: Employment & Earnings in U.S., 1909-1978; Employment,
Hours, and Earnings United States, 1981-93.



NOTE 2: Economic Weight of GDP Produced by Industrial Workforce

Industrial as % of Private Sector GDP  1960   1989
Nominal                               51.6%  38.5%
Real (1982=100)                       42.6%  44.0%

Source: Economic Report of the President 1995


NOTE 3: Single & Multiple Plant Companies

Year             1963     1977     1987
Number of Plants
Single Plant  260,000  278,700  288,000
Multi-Plant   457,900   81,200   80,900

Number of Workers
(in millions)
Single Plant      5.2      4.6       5.1 mil.
Multi-Plant      11.0     15.0      13.4 mil.

% of Value Added
by Companies
Single Plant      24%      17%       18%
Multi-Plant       76%      83%       82%

Real Assets Per Worker

               $9,300  $13,303   $26,040

Source: Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 1995,752

References

Council of Economic Advisors, "Economic Report the President",
1995
Hal Draper, "Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution", Vol. II, Monthly
Review Press, 1978
Peter F. Drucker, "The Age of Social Transformation," "Atlantic
Monthly", November 1994
Lewis Feuer, "Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and
Philosophy", Anchor Press, 1959
Bennett Harrison, "Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of
Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility", Books, 1994
Karl Marx, "Capital", Vol. 1, International Publishers, 1967
Karl Marx, "Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political
Economy", Pelican Books, 1973
Saskia Sassen, "The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo",
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