Supply and demand graphs help explain the price of something at a given time or place but it does not explain why things have the exchange value they have. The labour theory of value has far more relevance to our understanding of how we value commodities. The exchange value of commodities is determined by the amount of labour measured in working hours necessary to make them. Bicycles sell for less than cars due to the fewer hours to make bicycles than cars. While it does not explain the exact price of things, it does explain why they exchange for their approximate prices. This theory takes the mystery out of the concept of value by relating exchange value to human labour. The basis of capitalist economies is surplus value, that is, the hours of labour beyond what the worker is paid for and the value that is appropriated by the capitalist and that this is the basis of the wealth of capitalists.
Individual firms are under constant strain from two sources; competition from other firms and ongoing costs such as maintaining payment of wages to employees. Firms aim to increase productivity as much as possible. This is accomplished through improving technology and through squeezing as much work from a worker as is manageable. It is in their interests to get workers to work as hard as possible for as little pay as possible. It is vital to out-compete other firms; to drive costs down. This allows the firm to lower prices. Efficiency and low prices are the objective. Profit is the goal.
Wage labour is an important element on the cost side of the capitalist book-keeping ledger. The capitalist impulse is to minimize costs so as to maximize profit, and so left to themselves, capitalists will pay workers the lowest possible wages and deny or minimize all other benefits. They will ignore worker safety and deny any responsibility for worker health.
Understanding the labour theory of value makes clear that the wealth we see around us, the computer, the office desk that the computer sits on it and the chair you sit on and everything else that we use is a result of work. And without the input of work and without control (ownership) of resources, commodities have little to no market value (as opposed to use value). To understand this economic point of view is to at least consider the possibility that wealth starts first with nature but then with labour. Everything around you that you own and use is the result of effort of a vast army of unseen workers. The material reality we live in and with is not only the basis of wealth, it is wealth. The greatest error of those economic gurus is the attribution that wealth emanates 'from' the top and finds its way to the rest of us. In reality, the very genesis of wealth starts in the process of work. The erroneous assumption that we need thieves and parasites to make it all possible has blinded us all. Those that own, own more than ever.
What is really crucial for us to understand is that the common notion of what wealth is is wrong. Money is representative of wealth as a medium of exchange. It would be difficult to bring several pigs to a store to obtain a lawnmower. Money has little or no inherent value. And it is money (in various forms) that has become ‘the’ key commodity as capitalism has matured from capitalism proper to monopolism. Finance capitalists and money traders make a fortune dealing with money (as opposed to tangible commodities). They are dealing with spooks, the world of ether.
Understanding the labour theory of value not only allows us to see through the absurdity where millions are homeless when homes not only sit empty, but are demolished by the banks; where millions are unemployed while factories rust away. It shows us that it is the efforts of countless workers that have built the standard of living that we have become used to. It informs us that we can not only do it again, we can do much better. It is our labour power that is the potent powerhouse of latent wealth that we may all benefit from. We need to understand that the reality has always been, their wealth is based in our work. We need to understand to our bones that our wealth is our work. It does not come from 'them'. It never did. Once we realize that every dime owes its existence to labour we will understand that it is the people that hold all the power. That very realization, once it is understood by a critical mass, will transform our human world. The upshot is we can make this human world as we wish.
This perspective sees wealth begin with the raw materials that we process for use. The air we breathe does not need to be processed and it cannot be controlled (owned). If those conditions were in place, we would indeed be paying for the air we breathe as we do for the other necessities of life , food and water. Medical care, food, and shelter require processing and these items can be owned. As a result of this control, we are not free. We must sell ourselves, our time, for a wage in order to survive. If there is a way to make a buck, your needs will be served and served relatively well. If not, then it's hard luck.
The capitalists and governments throughout the world assume that it is they that provide the rest of us with what we need to survive (jobs and money). With that assumption it has led to bailouts, quantitative easing, and scores of austerity measures to protect them. We all know that the economy is a mess and our perception of how bad the economy really is, and what is in store for us in the future, varies from one individual to another. Yet one continuous perception is that things will get better, that jobs will come back, and that better times are ahead. We have faith that the recession will turn around. It has always worked this way in the past. Things will eventually pick up and manufacturers will hire again and the State will employ teachers and medical professionals, and build new roads and bridges. We have learned to expect business cycles and to expect hard times to be followed by a period of energetic manufacturing and spending.
Recession has become an everyday word bandied about, but remember what it means; people lose their jobs and more families and children go hungry. The capitalist class is using the crisis to drive down wages and cut benefits to workers. The wizards of economics will tell us that the only hope for us is that we make conditions good enough for investors. They say we must get rid of regulations and lower wages and working conditions to make investment attractive again. Why they should they invest in your town when the same work can be done in China or India for much less money? The globalization seeds that were planted in earlier decades have flourished.
The capitalists themselves will not even suggest that their system is meant to provide jobs, care for the poor, or bring the majority to a level of material satisfaction. There are no economists on the Right and there are no economists on the Left that will argue that capitalists or capitalism has a responsibility to provide for the people that are sick, elderly, for children or the unemployed. It not only won't do those things, it can't do those things. It is limited in this purpose and it has been unfairly cast into a role that it cannot live up to. Moreover, the notion that the so-called 'invisible hand of the market' will produce what is best for society is simply wrong.
For instance, the vital needs of citizens such as health care, housing, food, or whatever the case may be, are not being satisfied fully. Yet the easiest and most profitable way to invest however may be in the production of iPads or in buying and speculating in stocks and shares, commodities and currency futures and so on. If iPad sales will result in the most profit, then research, energy, and investment will focus on their further development, manufacture, and distribution. Research and development related to human beings needs is only relevant if profits can be made.
It naturally follows that an alternate means of production and distribution is required. The other alternative is to continue to let people suffer and die. The Republican prospetive candidates for the 2012 Presidential election were asked by Wolf Blitzer during a debate about a hypothetical thirty-something year old male that did not buy insurance who goes into a coma and needs intensive care. While the candidates struggled to euphemize their answers saying he should have bought insurance, the crowd cheered wildly voicing their enthusiastic agreement that the man should die. While this looks unbelievably barbaric, in fact 3,000 Americans die each month because they are not insured. (Obama’s plan is to fix it by forcing Americans, by law, to pay protection money to health insurance racket.)
To re-state the glaringly obvious: We cannot depend on self-interest impulses of a small portion of society to care for the sick, the elderly, and the vulnerable. We are depending on the most manipulative and selfish members of society who have been described as pschopaths to care for those most in need. Barbarism is returning. The powers that control our societies have taken an ever-more ominous and threatening tone. They criminalize and demonize the poor and helpless. Workers work harder for less. The exploitation is getting increasingly grim. Benefits to the unemployed and the poor are more meager and jobs are more scarce. We are slipping back into the world of Charles Dickens. Social problems beget social problems, one set of social problems exacerbates others and our spiral into Hell increases. Concentrations of poverty where hopelessness fuels addictions problems, which increases violence, which compromises child development, which causes many more social problems in the future and so on and so on. These expand from being neighbourhood problems, to whole cities to entire countries, to the whole world. Increased crime of all sorts play off each other, contributing an increasing reality of insecurity and instability. The old (so-called) 'American dream' is finished.
The time is coming when we need to act. At some point the situation will become too critical to salvage. We have become too reliant on an expectation that somebody else will fix things. We expect politicians to take care of it. We are waiting for criminals, and cowardly whores to take care of us in this age of barbarism. They can’t and they won’t provide for those in need. Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers of capitalism, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it alive. Overworked, underpaid workers in Asian sweat-shops are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the West clad in cheap fashions and playing with their iPads. Can anyone doubt that Capitalism is a failed economic system? How many times must it fail for people to accept that fact?
We have a choice to make. We either see people that cannot earn a wage or find any other means of feeding themselves as doomed, or, take responsibility to take care of human beings that cannot survive or live comfortably without help. The time to start organizing to provide the essential needs for the weakest members of societies is well behind us and we have not even started. We need to do more than occupy Wall Street. One way or another, we must take matters into our own hands. We have always depended on one another. It has always been the efforts of ourselves and other workers that produced all the goods and services we needed and enjoyed. At this point we need to develop ways and means to organize work to produce those goods and services for each other, for our families, and for our communities. The time will come when revolution will not be a choice. Reality itself will demand it in the requirement to meet human needs. We must recognize that it is not the capitalists that actually produce and provide goods and services. It is you and me. The absurdity of factories rusting while millions look for jobs, while millions do without the goods and services they need; the absurdity of millions homeless while homes lay empty is screaming at us. Those suffering screams compel us to end our reliance on the wealthy to make things happen. We need to organize. Workers must have decision-making power over their own work and what it is to be used for determined by the community so to truly democratizes the process. Industry that does not respond to the needs of the community is not worth anything to the community. Integration between producers and consumers (the community) is vital to the democratization of free association.
To get there, to get to the place where we can realistically take control of our workplaces and our communities we must take control of the state away from the plutocrats. We must transform cynicism into resistance. In the Twenty-first Century there are two distinct economic models. The existing predominant one is capitalism and the other is socialism. Capital dictates the direction of capitalism, a economic system that is run by the rich, for the rich, at the expense of the rest. It's about time we all have a say in what is going on. Socialism is a bottom-up approach to economics. Socialists don't want to live under a totalitarian state, nor is it about wanting to live in a commune.
The rich will try anything to stop us even if it means social unrest and upheaval. Protests are nothing new. We have become accustomed to single-issue protests that are implicitly reformist in nature. There were civil rights protests, women's rights, gay rights, environmental protests, and protests for many other various issues. They all had in common the underlying desire to tweak the system, to make the plight of a certain segment of the population better. Real anti-capitalist protests has been absent until recently. The breadth and depth of the Occupy Movement was truly revolutionary. The European anti-austerity campaigns have been both radical and widespread. However, the comfortable 1% have little to fear. So far, it is merely a protest movement and that's all it is. We need to do something more than that. We can continue to protest and we can complain and make noise. But so what? This movement is simply a reaction to the recession and excessive money hoarding by the banks and corporations. To take it a step farther will require organization. Taking that step requires vision. An alternative to the status quo needs to be articulated. What would that society look like? How do we get there? Our collective mentality is mired in traditional reformist mode, all about redistributing wealth and tinkering and modifying the current system. We need to reach some consensus as to where we go from here and we need consensus on broad goals. We will need to build solidarity and alliances and specific tactics. Circumstances change, people change. Grasping the reality of one's situation can be painful. The world is in constant flux and our understanding of it can never be wholly accurate. However, this does not mean we're absolved from making the attempt, and we should not allow a convenient cynicism to hold us in its thrall. Workers have never yet made use of their political power. They have played the game of their masters for the benefit of the master class - and now many of them, disgusted with their own blind and stupid performance, are renouncing politics and refusing to see any difference between the capitalist parties financed by the ruling class to perpetuate class rule and a socialist party organised by the workers themselves as a means of wresting the control of government and of industry from the capitalists.
Class war has raged for decades. The rich have been winning. It is time to change all that. We demand the machinery of production in the name of the workers and the control of society in the name of the people. We demand the abolition of capitalism and wage-slavery. We demand the unconditional surrender of the ruling class. We demand complete control of industry by the workers; we demand all the wealth they produce for everybodies enjoyment. We demand the Earth for all the people.
Adapted from articles by Archie Kennedy
No comments:
Post a Comment