As British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer casually bins the last of his joke pre-election ‘New deal for workers’ pledges, withdrawing from an earlier commitment to stop employers pressurising staff into leaving their phones on indefinitely so that they are permanently on call, the role of social democracy in keeping workers docile and divided is exposed for all to see.
When union bosses were telling workers last spring that even though Sir Keir was openly advocating for genocide in Palestine, and even though he was promising to head up the most “pro-business government” Britain has ever seen, workers should vote Labour nonetheless because the party had plans to reverse some of the most egregious anti-worker measures and restore some of the rights at work that have been lost or eroded over the past 40 years.
Even so-called ‘radicals’ like Mick Lynch of the RMT and Unite’s Sharon Graham added their voices to the ‘Vote Labour’ chorus that assailed workers from all sides.
But what happened when Starmer had been safely installed in No 10? One by one the ‘pledges’ were quietly dropped and the reverse was implemented: not only a doubling down on the support for imperialist war in Ukraine and Gaza, but a ramping up of attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable people in Britain under the excuse of an “unexpected budget deficit” (all the fault of those nasty Tories, of course).
Wage-slavery v chattel slavery
To demand the ‘right to switch off’, to limit the hours of work to those agreed when the worker sells to the capitalist his ability to work (his labour-power), is no more than to require the purchaser of labour-power to honour the terms of the contract he has entered into with the worker, the seller of labour-power.
It is this which distinguishes wage-slavery from the outright slavery of an earlier epoch. The slave was a chattel, bought and sold for life by the slave-master. The wage-slave does not sell his body all in one go to the capitalist. Rather he sells to the capitalist the only commodity that he owns and can bring to market: his labour-power, and he sells it piecemeal, for use during certain hours.
Every blurring of the dividing line between the boss’s time and the worker’s time effectively keeps the employee permanently tagged to the job and with less and less ‘private life’ in which to raise a family, advance his education, broaden his cultural interests and even (heavens forbid!) study marxist-leninist science.
