Guard Labor
My article on Guard Labor is in the new issue of Dollars and Sense. It is extracted from my forthcoming book, The Invisible Handcuffs.
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0110toc.html
The article begins:
Guards are everywhere in a capitalist economy. A few are dressed up in uniforms, so they are easy to spot. But most do not look like guards at all. Some sit in comfortable offices; others work on assembly lines in factories. James O’Connor, a prolific sociologist from UC Santa Cruz, describes one familiar set of guards whom we do not usually think of as guards:
Consider the labor of the ticket seller at a movie house. The seller’s task is merely to transfer the right to sit in the theater to the movie-goer in exchange for the price of a ticket. But it may not be immediately obvious that it is not the lack of a ticket that keeps you out of the theater … The ticket is actually torn up and discarded by a husky young man who stands between the box office and the seat that I want.
These guards are a central feature of capitalism. Capitalists depend upon guard labor to protect their commodities, including the goods and premises they own, but especially the labor-power in their employ. Capitalism’s reliance on guard labor deforms the entire productive process, not only wasting labor, but also snuffing out badly needed creativity.
25 – The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression
30 – Manufacturing Discontent: The Trap of Individualism in Corporate Society
Class Warfare in the Information Age
Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology
Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity
The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment
unsettling economics 
I didn’t understand Hamlet until I worked as a security guard for the Bank of America World Trade Center in SF. Graveyard shift. If you’ll remember, the play opens with a couple of graveyard-shift guards talking to each other.
It was while patrolling the empty halls of stock brokers’ offices at four in the morning that it occurred to me that I was working to guard the money of thieves. Hamlet too realized that the logic of revenge was of a piece with the corrupt, hierarchical world of his father’s kingdom. A paradox then; a paradox now.
Joanna
What a brilliant comment. I wish that you would get your writing out more quickly.
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I *really* loved that article— it gave me connections and context that I’d not thought of before. While I see other references on the web (probably from different perspectives than yours), the concept was new to me. Thank you for helping me make a bit more sense of one more hidden reality.
…uncledon.
Flagstaff, AZ.