The General Law of Social Production

Marx’s general law of social production stems from his argument that capitalist competition gives rise to continued efforts to break each process of production down into ever-smaller constituent elements, without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform new processes. This in turn compels workers to be versatile, flexible, and mobile in order to survive in the capitalist economy. In the advanced economies, and in particular in Europe, this tendency is hampered by the legacy of labour market and welfare institutions that protect workers from the impact of the changes in contracts, patterns of work, and forms of welfare or social protection that machine- and digital platform-led revolutions in production require. This chapter documents the intensive collaboration between the OECD, the World Bank, and the European Commission to secure welfare and labour market reforms with the objective of forcing ‘hard to reach’ groups such as youth or married women to enter the labour market or increase their participation. At the same time, these organisations advocate the replacement of ‘standard labour contracts’ with more flexible patterns of work, and a reduced onus on employers to offer permanence or rights to redundancy payments on dismissal. The chapter details efforts of these institutions to incentivise paid work, re-orient education towards work-related skills training and ‘employability’, and devise a ‘constitution’ for global competitiveness.