Aggregate Worker
Autor: Sebastião Matias de Carvalho Neto | Publicado: 2012-10-12T12:46:00-03:00

     Aggregate Worker, =

socially combined
individual working capacities based on the
concrete historical types of cooperation
and division of labour. Two aspects should
be distinguished in the idea of aggregate
worker: the general economic content and
the socio-economic form. The essence of
the first aspect is the transformation of
the individual producer, who manufactures
a product from beginning to end and often
is involved in its path all the way to the
user, into a member of a production
personnel organised so that the closeness of its
each participant to the immediate
operations with the object of labour itself varies
(see Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 476--
77). The second aspect characterises social
relations among members of the production
personnel (within production sections and
the entire economic system), which are
moulded according to the existing forms
of ownership of the means of production.
The first appearance of the aggregate
worker is associated with simple capitalist
cooperation, that is, the organisation of
labour which combines many workers in
one labour process, or in varied, but linked
labour processes supervised by the
capitalist. Here the existing instruments of
labour permit, rather than impose, the
combining of individual working capacities.
It is capitalist private ownership which
becomes the key condition for the advent
of the aggregate worker. The creation of
the aggregate worker under capitalism
occurs in the form of antagonisms innate
in this social system. Private ownership of
the means of production narrows the
possibilities for the cooperation of labour
and for the aggregate worker. The
increasing fragmentation of the production
process and the established technical division of
labour have a negative effect on the
development of the worker, society's chief
productive force, which runs contrary to
the requirements of the scientific and
technological revolution, which stipulates
the universality of knowledge. There is a
difference in principle between the content
and form of the aggregate worker in
socialist environment and those in
bourgeois society. Meanwhile, as society
advances towards communism, the scope and
nature of cooperation and the division of
labour change, which produces a change
in the aggregate worker. The
decisive factor in moulding the aggregate
worker at the highest stage of communism,
which is &quot;...a community of free individuals,
carrying on their work with the means
of production in common, in which the
labour-power of all the different individuals
is consciously applied as the combined
labour-power of the community&quot; (Karl
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 82--83), is the
radical transformation of the material
foundation of labour on the basis of the
scientific and technological revolution. The 
material and technical buse of communism
requires a work force with even higher
cultural and technical standards, able to handle a
totally automated system of production.
The scientific and technological revolution
influences the material production in a way
that the share of mental labour is rapidly
growing, as is the share of professions and
skills related to industrial design and
organisation; the balance between the
professional groups is significantly changed;
new professions, linked to the most modern
trends of technological development, are
growing. Depending on the revised
professional and skills structure of the aggregate
worker, social and production relations
between the workers become more
sophisticated, and the supreme level of collective
principles matures---that of communism.